Sorry to spam you guys with my noise, but for the sake of posterity,
I thought I'd reply with the solution to this problem.
I learned a lot about the PGSQL protocol during this time. So, I
ended up getting a Ethereal installed on a machine so I could follow
the protocol and see what exactly was being sent to it. As it turns
out, a separate piece of software on this server, which uses a single
database handle to do its work was somehow sending an error message
from another perl module as a message to the database.
It's a guess that somehow it got its file handles mixed up or
something along those lines. So the "73" (PgSQL 7.4) or the
"I" (PgSQL 7.3) was truly an I since the message going to the server
was something like:
"Invalid blah blah blah"
instead of:
"Q....SELECT * FROM TABLE"
Mystery solved. I've disabled the offensive code until I can more
closely investigate in a controlled environment. Give that we didn't
really need it, turning it off is an adequate solution for a
production server.
--Joel
On Feb 4, 2006, at 1:16 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
Joel Richard <postgresql@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
... we occasionally get the following message in our apache log
file. I'm looking for information on what it means:
DBD::Pg::db selectrow_array failed: FATAL: Socket command type I
unknown
This looks to me like a protocol-level incompatibility: probably the
client code is sending data in a slightly different format than the
server is expecting, or one side or the other is off-by-one about
message lengths, or something like that. One way or another the
server is receiving an 'I' when it wasn't expecting that.
I'm not aware of any such bugs on the server side in 7.3.4. What I
suspect is a problem on the DBD::Pg side, where you did not specify
what version you are using ... but if it's recent, it probably thinks
that talking to 7.3.4 is a legacy problem ...
regards, tom lane
Joel Richard
The Richard Group
joel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
703-584-5802
